UNABOMBER PATH LEADS BACK TO UTAH

Gary Marx and Peter Kendall, Tribune Staff WritersCHICAGO TRIBUNE

On a brisk February morning in 1987, a young woman stared out the window at a strange man in a hooded gray sweatshirt and sunglasses. She watched as he pulled a peculiar wooden object from a laundry bag and placed it beside a car.

Although separated by glass, the woman stood just a few feet away from the man. She was close enough to see his long, thin fingers, smooth hands and rough, ruddy complexion.

"What the hell is this guy doing?" she asked a fellow employee at CAAMS Inc., a computer store near the University of Utah. "It looks like somebody's trying to flatten some tires."

The telephone rang, and the two workers became distracted. Minutes later, their boss, Gary Wright, drove up, saw the strange object and kicked it, detonating a pipe bomb that lacerated his arms, face and legs.

The explosion brought more than 90 federal agents to Salt Lake City in a massive government effort to catch a deadly serial bomber who by then had struck 11 times in a campaign of terror that began in Chicago in 1978.

That quick glimpse by the computer store worker eight years ago is the only time anyone has seen the terrorist later dubbed the Unabomber. It generated the now-familiar police sketch of an expressionless face, eyes hidden by sunglasses.

Now, as the bomber has re-emerged in public with a lengthy anti-technology manifesto published last week in two newspapers, federal agents have revived their investigation of his Salt Lake City connection, the little-scrutinized Utah years that may prove crucial to their manhunt.

As in Chicago, where authorities believe the Unabomber once attended or taught school, federal agents are reopening old avenues of investigation in Utah once considered dead ends.

Investigators believe that if they could answer one question-why did the Unabomber apparently move from Chicago to Salt Lake City around 1980?-they might be able to figure out who he is.

Was he drawn to Salt Lake City's burgeoning high-tech industries? Were there academic programs at the universities in the area that attracted him? Were there religious reasons that brought him to this Mormon city?

"There could be a lot of reasons he moved to Utah," said Terry Turchie, a senior FBI official on the 90-member Unabomber task force. "Unfortunately, we haven't been able to sort them out. . . . If we can hook up the beginning in Chicago with Utah and later northern California, suddenly we have a lot of clues."

Investigators are interested in the Utah connection because it is only one of three places, along with Chicago and northern California, where they are certain the bomber has spent time. The bomber planted or mailed four explosive devices from Utah, one each in 1981, 1982, 1985 and 1987.

Before the Unabomber recently gave investigators new clues with his rambling manifesto, they pinned their hopes for capturing him on the sketch based on that chance sighting outside the Salt Lake City computer store.

For six months after that last Utah bombing, law enforcement officials pursued him tirelessly across the state. They mailed copies of the sketch to every household in Salt Lake City. They followed hundreds of leads, interviewed thousands of people and tailed a half-dozen suspects.

Nothing panned out. By the fall of 1987, investigators believed the bomber moved from this city at the foot of the Rocky Mountains to northern California, and the investigation largely moved along with him.

Now, federal agents are back. In recent weeks, federal investigators have asked a half-dozen academics at the University of Utah and at Brigham Young University in nearby Provo to analyze the Unabomber's 35,000-word tract in hopes of evoking memories of a student who may have voiced ideas about the devastating effects of technology on modern society.

In May, federal authorities subpoenaed library records at BYU, and they are planning to subpoena circulation records at the University of Utah library, sources said. Investigators want to know who checked out four books the Unabomber cited in his manifesto during the time investigators believe he lived in the state.

One of the professors asked to read the Unabomber's manifesto is LeRoy Bearnson, a soft-spoken, 60-year-old computer expert at BYU. Like everyone involved in the case, he was brought into it suddenly and for reasons he can not fathom.

In 1982, more than four years before the bomb was placed outside the Salt Lake City computer store, an explosive was mailed from BYU's student union building to a professor in Tennessee. The return address on the package was LeRoy Bearnson at BYU.

"I have no idea who he is," said Bearnson, sitting in his crowded office. "I don't think I know him, but I don't know."

Since the investigation into the Unabomber was revived in 1993, Bearnson has spent entire days with investigators, trying to find some connection between himself and the bomber.

"I went over my entire childhood," he said. "They asked if I had ever had affairs, if my wife had ever had affairs. They made me go over my entire life."

He was given diagrams of the bombs and asked if he could see some idiosyncracy in the design that could lead them to a student.

Investigators also asked him to read the manifesto to see if he could identify the author. He couldn't.

Investigators long have believed that the bomber is either a student or has some connection with universities. Using extensive databases, they have compared student lists from schools around Chicago, Salt Lake City and northern California to generate names of students who took the path the bomber did. They even had agents posing as students attend classes and wander the hallways of BYU.

Both BYU and the University of Utah were growing rapidly during the late 1970s and early 1980s, though officials at the two schools say there is nothing in particular that might have drawn the bomber, who has shown some knowledge of political science, history and sociology.

"Usually, students come to a university when a professor publishes and makes a name for himself," explained Harold Bauman, a University of Utah history of science professor who has been interviewed extensively by the FBI.

"But the professors we brought into our department were too young to have attracted students from around the country. There just wasn't anything special at the university to attract him. There must have been something else."

Local economists say Utah's job market was bullish in the late 1970s and early 1980s, sparked primarily by a sharp rise in oil prices that fueled massive investment in the energy sector. There was also steady growth in a well-established defense industry and new computer software, pharmaceutical, biomedical and other high-tech companies.

The economic boom in Utah lasted until the mid-1980s, when oil prices collapsed and several major manufacturers laid off thousands of workers.

Investigators also have considered the possibility that the bomber is somehow affiliated with the Mormon Church, headquartered in Salt Lake City.

In 1980, the Unabomber nearly killed United Airlines president Percy Wood when a mail bomb ripped through the kitchen of Wood's Lake Forest, Ill., home. A few days before the bomb arrived, Wood received a letter from the bomber signed with the name Enoch Fisher.

According to Mormon theology, the City of Enoch was lifted into the heavens and is a pure place that will return to Earth at the "end times," the end of the world.

"Over and over again, we've had people who we thought were the Unabomber," said Salt Lake City police detective Kyle Jones, an investigator working on the case with federal authorities.

"The background and history looked good. Many suspects had moved from Chicago. They were at the universities in question. They expressed difficulty with computers. But over and over again, we had to eliminate them (as suspects)."

"It's difficult to say what we did wrong," added Jones, who joined the Unabomber investigation three days after the Salt Lake City computer store bombing. "It's difficult to say what we missed. . . . He just vanished. It's like he walked into a time warp."